“Blink Twice” is many things: a bracing debut feature, already a source of debate fodder —and, undebatably, the career assignment that Channing Tatum really, really needed.
He’s a funny kind of kind-of star. Tatum has learned to command the screen in the right role, working around his technical limitations, mostly to do with his voice. But coming off the strained, overblown romantic comedy “Fly Me to the Moon,” where he could barely get through his rapid-fire banter without gasping for air before the punchline, his performance in “Blink Twice” is pretty astonishing.
Is it because he’s playing a bad guy? No spoiler there; it’s in the movie’s trailers. Antagonists can free an actor, or at least vary an actor’s diet of solemn or sardonic good guys. Often, though, actors see villainy, even complicated villainy, as a license to overkill.
Not here. Tatum’s turn in “Blink Twice” is like the movie itself: crafty, rich, strange and, even when it wobbles a bit, destabilizing in ways guaranteed to lead to a less-than-stellar audience exit poll CinemaScore on opening weekend. More interestingly, it’s a bracing directorial debut for co-writer Zoë Kravitz. It’s also one of the few recent American thrillers with something on its mind, and the wiles to tap into something inside an organically realized nightmare scenario.
Tatum’s character is clouded by a recent, vaguely specified scandal, and “Blink Twice” begins with this man in apology and image-repair mode, having redirected some of his wealth to philanthropic galas and good causes. He has also bought a small private island somewhere, apparently in the Caribbean. There he spends time with close friends, eating stunningly photogenic meals, drinking wines costly enough to tilt the stock market this way or that. Also, he still does some drugs, as he did more carelessly, we hear, in the old days. Now, as Slater King tells one of his guests, it’s “with intention.”
The guest is a newbie, a knockout and agog at her good fortune. She’s the real star of “Blink Twice”: Naomi Ackie, the excellent English actress, playing Frida, a somewhat directionless Los Angeles cocktail waitress who works for a catering firm with her roommate, played by the invaluable supporting ringer Alia Shawkat. At a gala honoring King, the ladies decide the crash the party they’re supposed to be working and it works. King invites them to join his posse for a jaunt down to the island.
The screenplay by Kravitz and E.T. Feigenbaum pretends to be a straight-line narrative, but there’s something afoot, and it’s messing with Frida’s senses and sense of time. Something in the food? In the flowers picked from the nearby jungle, by the perpetually nearby local “help”? The louche male guests, played by Christian Slater and Haley Joel Osment, to name two, dart between conviviality and connivance, while the women — led by Adria Arjona, terrific as the longtime veteran of a babes-in-“Survivor”-land reality series — get high, get drunk, and run around as if being pursued by wolves.
Where this scenario goes next has its payoffs, and a drawback or two. “Blink Twice” lands on a gratifyingly bloody note, and with near-miraculous skill, director Kravitz manages some tonal change-ups beautifully, thanks to the razor-sharp editing of Kathryn J. Schubert and an ever-surprising sound design from Jon Flores, folding nicely in with Chanda Dancy’s score. The visual design of the picture, very big on blood reds and geometric carve-ups of this corner of paradise, feels like a single idea, fully expressed. If the resolution to “Blink Twice” won’t satisfy everyone, well, there it is.
Watching the film, certain probable influences come to mind, including Jordan Peele’s work, especially the great scene in “Get Out” with Betty Gabriel as the smiling, freaked-out housekeeper. The private-island premise recalls the late Jeffrey Epstein’s real estate holdings along with his crimes. The mind games and aggressively art-directed evocations of untrustworthy paradise, meanwhile, may link back for some viewers to lesser works such as “Don’t Worry Darling.”
Even if you get ahead of the story here, or resist the daring lurches in tone, “Blink Twice” marks a formidable directorial debut. As an actor (not onscreen here), Kravitz is so effortless, you rarely detect any overt planning or determination in her performances. Her movie’s a different case: a precise visual telling of a tale heading somewhere awful, but also cathartic. There is wit here, and expert supporting turns (Geena Davis is on the money as the billionaire’s assistant who has seen too much). Ackie is exceptional. And as dead-eyed schemer hiding behind a veneer of gentle contrition, Tatum has rarely seemed more alive and engaged on screen.
“Blink Twice” — 3.5 stars (out of 4)
MPA rating: R (for strong violent content, sexual assault, drug use and language throughout, and some sexual references)
Running time: 1:42
How to watch: Premieres in theaters Aug. 22
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
